Application of wave propagation to pyroshock analysis

Pyroshocks are high frequency transients due to pyrotechnic devices used in aerospace engineering in order to deploy solar arrays and antennae, separate subsystems from the spacecraft or separate the spacecraft itself from the base stage booster; their prediction is usually complex and very time consuming. The aim of this article is to investigate on the application of the analysis of transmission of waves inelastic media in order to predict the dynamic response to pyroshocks. The work is completed by numerical examples, related to components of common use in the aerospace engineering field, showing the comparison between results obtained by using both MSC-NASTRAN and this novel application of wave propagation analysis.